Gary Gygax’s game

Jerry Stratton, March 4, 2008

I don’t know what to say about this, I’m just going to post links. Table-top role-playing games were the innovation of our lifetime; so much of our entertainment would have been completely different if it hadn’t been for D&D or something like it. For my part, it provided a creative game to play with my friends in high school and college, a very different experience from the poker games of my parents and the Risk games of previous college generations.

For better or for worse, my life would be completely different without D&D. It chose my friends, it focussed my attention to writing far earlier than would have happened otherwise. I wouldn’t live where I do or work where I do, if my brother’s friend hadn’t introduced us to Dungeons & Dragons.

Edit: I spent yesterday and today at the Emerging Technologies conference and updated this page between sessions. The very fact that I’m here is because of Dungeons & Dragons. When I went to college and was unpacking my books (advice to college freshmen: leave your door open while unpacking), a sophomore came by, saw my AD&D books, and asked if I wanted to get in a game. I still game regularly with one of the people I met during that first night of college gaming.

The guy who happened to see my gaming books is the same guy who later convinced me to take a programming job in San Diego. I’d never planned on programming as a career; I had a psychology degree and had just spent a year studying music in Los Angeles. That programming job led to a job at the university where I now work, back in the early nineties.

It put me in a position to capitalize on the web when the web began, a very short window of opportunity where a self-trained programmer with a degree in psychology could end up managing the server and code of an entire university web site.

Literally, without D&D I would not be doing any of this. Would I be working on Django in my spare time? Writing custom web logs? Writing book-length fiction? My first successful attempt at a novel came from my bicycle ride between the San Diego beaches to work.

What Dungeons & Dragons taught me is that there are things worth doing that the mainstream will not understand.

“It is almost too much to get my mind about. But I’ve just had news that our dear Dungeon Master has passed away. Ernie called this morning, he thought we should let the fans know. He’s just sent an email out.”

“For many of us who grew up before PCs became ubiquitous and long before it was cool to be a geek, Gygax’s creation meant Friday nights spent playing games with your friends, not wishing you were someone else. Instead of finding creative ways to break the law, we were busy rolling 20-sided dice and doing battle with Orcs and other evil beasts.”

“Of all the people who contributed to the culture that made you who you are and championed the idea that you can do anything, be anything and do anything any way you want to however you can think it up… Gary Gygax wrote the book. Literally.”

“…an incredibly high percentage of the successful academics, scientists, and intellectuals from my generation were D&D players in their teens. I don’t think that is a coincidence. Playing D&D also helped get me and many others interested in ancient and medieval history, which remains a major interest many years after I gave up the game itself.”

“D&D isn’t where we learned to write, but where we learned to think epic. A game could last all night. Or all year. By the time my friends and I stopped playing, our characters had three generations of mythology behind them, with family trees that would bewilder Faulkner.”

“Dungeons & Dragons had a way of turning game players into game designers. The rule set was pure potentiality, and the greater the creativity of each dungeon master, the more the players could extract from it. Many young people found their calling while playing D&D.”

Gods & Monsters rolls an 18 for age today, pioneer game writer Greg Stafford died two weeks ago, and stories about the early days of gaming has me wondering, was the discovery of table-top gaming a perfect storm, or was it inevitable?

Thematic games combine a love of rules with a love of setting. In these metagames, the rules are the setting, and the setting is the rules. Further, acknowledging the rules makes it easier to remove them. Such games are usually acutely aware that character advancement is a reward encouraging the actions that incur the reward and which move the game towards a specific conclusion.

In the eighties and through the nineties, people started writing games where the world was more important than the rules. In theory, this should make for a different kind of character advancement as well.

Four more pages with the topic gaming history, and other related pages